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‘It Will Take Off Like a Wildfire’: The Unique Dangers of the Washington State Measles Outbreak

posted by mrpg on Friday February 08 2019, @05:50PM   
from the will-this-end? dept.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

'It will take off like a wildfire': The unique dangers of the Washington state measles outbreak

[...] "You know what keeps me up at night?" said Clark County Public Health Director Alan Melnick. "Measles is exquisitely contagious. If you have an under-vaccinated population, and you introduce a measles case into that population, it will take off like a wildfire."

[...] Anti-vaccination activists, for their part, contend that state officials are twisting facts to stoke public fear.

"It shouldn't be called an outbreak," Seattle-area mother Bernadette Pajer, a co-founder of the state's main anti-vaccine group, Informed Choice Washington, said of the measles cases, arguing that the illness has spread only within a small, self-contained group. "I would refer to it as an in-break, within a community."

[...] Clements eventually changed her mind, deciding to give her kids the shots after a doctor at a vaccine workshop answered her questions for more than two hours, at one point drawing diagrams on a whiteboard to explain cell interaction. He was thoughtful, factual and also "still very warm," she said.

[...] In Washington, state lawmakers supporting tougher vaccine requirements are mounting their second effort in the past three years to make it harder for parents to opt out of vaccinations.

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Original Submission

• Re:think about it (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:41PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:41PM (#798504)

  The original idea behind vaccinations was to eradicate the virus. This morphed into the current policy of needing to pay for vaccines into the indefinite future once the predictions of measles eradication in 1967 failed.

  The Center for Disease Control (CDC) led in mounting the program with a formal paper at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in Miami in the fall of 1966. Two colleagues and I wrote the “official statement” which outlined in detail unqualified statements about the epidemiology of measles and made an unqualified prediction. My third position in the authorship of this paper did not adequately reflect my contribution to the work.14 I will make but two quotes:

          1. “The infection spreads by direct contact from person to person, and by the airborne route among susceptibles congregated in enclosed spaces.” (Obviously the ideas of Perkins and Wells had penetrated my consciousness but not sufficiently to influence my judgment). 2. “Effective use of (measles) vaccines during the coming winter and spring should insure the eradication of measles from the United States in 1967.” Such was my faith in the broad acceptance of the vaccine by the public and the health professions and in the infallibility of herd immunity.

          [...]

          There are many reasons and explanations for this rather egregious blunder in prediction. The simple truth is that the prediction was based on confidence in the Reed-Frost epidemic theory, in the applicability of herd immunity on a general basis, and that measles cases were uniformly infectious. I am sure I extended the teachings of my preceptors beyond the limits that they had intended during my student days.

          In the relentless light of the well-focussed retrospectiscope, the real failure was our neglect of conducting continuous and sufficiently sophisticated epidemiological field studies of measles. We accepted the doctrines imbued into us as students wikout maintaining the eternal skepticism of the true scientist.

          [...]

          Clearly we must revise our theory and recognize that these outbreaks must be airborne in character involving exposure to aerosols presumably created by the rare super-spreader who contaminates a large populated enclosed space such as a school auditorium or gymnasium. These have happened sufficiently often to prove the far sightedness of Perkins and Wells when the rest of us were smugly secure in our epidemic theories, our traditional faith in contact infection and herd immunity.

  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6939399 [nih.gov]

  By 1968 they already realized what they had done:

  Campaigns such as the one described have altered the epidemiology of measles. No longer will the disease contribute as much to maintaining herd immunity. The prevention of measles epidemics will now require constant maintenance immunization programs.

  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1228954/ [nih.gov] [nih.gov]

  Parent

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